cannot enrich themselves by their places.  All keep open table at Paris three days in the week, and at Fontainebleau every day."[67] M. de Lamoignon being appointed Chancellor with a salary of 100,000 livres, people at once declare that he will be ruined;[68] “for he has taken all the officials of M. d’Aguesseau’s kitchen, whose table alone cost 80,000 livres.  The banquet he gave at Versailles to the first council held by him cost 6,000 livres, and he must always have seats at table, at Versailles and at Paris, for twenty persons.”  At Chambord,[69] Marshal de Saxe always has two tables, one for sixty, and the other for eighty persons; also four hundred horses in his stables, a civil list of more than 100,000 crowns, a regiment of Uhlans for his guard, and a theater costing over 600,000 livres, while the life he leads, or which is maintained around him, resembles one of Rubens’s bacchanalian scenes.  As to the special and general provincial governors we have seen that, when they reside on the spot, they fulfill no other duty than to entertain; alongside of them the intendant, who alone attends to business, likewise receives, and magnificently, especially for the country of a States-General.  Commandants, lieutenants-general, the envoys of the central government throughout, are equally induced by habit and propriety, as well as by their own lack of occupation, to maintain a drawing-room; they bring along with them the elegance and hospitality of Versailles.  If the wife follows them she becomes weary and “vegetates in the midst of about fifty companions, talking nothing but commonplace, knitting or playing lotto, and sitting three hours at the dinner table.”  But “all the military men, all the neighboring gentry and all the ladies in the town,” eagerly crowd to her balls and delight in commending “her grace, her politeness, her equality."[70] These sumptuous habits prevail even among people of secondary position.  By virtue of established usage colonels and captains entertain their subordinates and thus expend “much beyond their salaries."[71] This is one of the reasons why regiments are reserved for the sons of the best families, and companies in them for wealthy gentlemen.  The vast royal tree, expanding so luxuriantly at Versailles, sends forth its offshoots to overrun France by thousands, and to bloom everywhere, as at Versailles, in bouquets of finery and of drawing room sociability.

VII.  Provincial nobility.

Prelates, seigniors and minor provincial nobles. — The feudal aristocracy transformed into a drawing room group.

Following this pattern, and as well through the effect of temperature, we see, even in remote provinces, all aristocratic branches having a flourishing social life.  Lacking other employment, the nobles exchange visits, and the chief function of a prominent seignior is to do the honors of his house creditably.  This applies as well to ecclesiastics as to laymen.  The one hundred and thirty-one bishops and archbishops,